Payback at Big Silver (25 page)

Sam just looked at him. He watched the sheriff take the bandanna from around his neck, wad it and press it carefully onto the broken collarbone. He took his hand down and let the blood soak through and hold it in place for the time being. Rifle in hand, he walked to the open door.

Sam gave him a curious look.

“Will telling him he killed his son make you feel any better, Sheriff?” he said. On the street, Edsel Centrila managed a wheezing broken laugh. He swung the Remington back and forth as if searching for something or someone to kill.

“No, it won't,” Stone said over his good shoulder. “Far as I'm concerned, he need never know he did it.” With that, he raised the rifle to his good shoulder. With no regard to the pain it caused him, he steadied the front stock, took aim and fired a round that left a red mist looming as Edsel Centrila fell back dead in the street.

Sam stood for a moment, making it right in his mind. For all of the bitter vengeance festering between the two, in the end Sam figured Stone just did the man a favor. He watched Stone lower the rifle and lean it against the wall. He saw him go to where Mae Rose sat watching, the cape gathered at her throat.

“Let me look at you, Mae Rose,” Stone said, easing the hood back so it fell to her shoulders.

“Don't look at me, Sheriff,” Mae Rose said. “I know I look terrible.” She tried to look away, but Stone moved his face with hers.

“Look at me,” he said. He carefully tipped her swollen chin up and looked into her blackened, swollen eyes. “If you were any prettier, I don't think I could stand it.”

The Ranger looked away and walked to the open door. Ignacio Cady stood staring. His brother, Lyle, had come around some and stood with his bloody head bobbing on his chest.

“I'll just go get the doctor and bring him back,” Sam said. He stepped out across the boardwalk and onto the dirt street. At the Silver Palace, men were venturing out and looking toward the sheriff's office.

“Ranger,” Stone called out before Sam had gone fifty feet. When he stopped and looked around, he saw Stone in the open door, cupping his bleeding wound. “I kept my word, you know,” he said.

Sam just looked at him.

“I promised not to come out this door, and I didn't, huh?” He gave a thin half smile and touched a finger to the side of his head. A cough drop lay in his cheek.

Sam offered no reply. He only shook his head and gave a toss of a hand back over his shoulder. And he walked on.

Read on for a look at one of Ralph Cotton's most loved Westerns

WILDFIRE

Available from Signet.

Arizona Territory

Wildfire raged.

The young Ranger, Sam Burrack, sat atop a rust-colored barb on a bald ridge overlooking a wide, rocky chasm. With a battered brass-trimmed telescope, he scanned beyond the buffering walls of boulder and brush. Long, rising hillsides ran slantwise heaven to earth, covered by an endless pine woodlands. He studied the blanketing fire as it billowed and twisted its way north to south along the hill lines. He watched flames the color of hell lick upward hundreds of feet, drifting, blackening the heavens.

Through the circle of the lens, he spotted four wolves sitting next to one another along a rock ledge, winded and panting. Their pink tongues a-loll, they stared back at the wall of smoke and fire as if numbed, overpowered by it.

At the bottom of the hills, where the woodlands came to an end at a chasm, Sam saw a large brown bear stop in its tracks, turn and rise on its hind legs. The large beast stood erect with its forearms and claws spread wide and raged back at the fire, ready to do battle. Yet even so powerful a beast looked helpless and frail beneath that which lay spoil to its domain. At the end of its roar, the bear dropped back onto all fours as if bowing in submission, and loped on.

The Ranger shook his head, noting how little caution the other fleeing woodland creatures paid the large beast as they darted among dry washes and gullies and bounded over brush and rock with no more than a reflex glance in the roaring bear's direction. Even the barb beneath him paid no mind to the bear's warning until a draft of hot smoke swept in behind it. Then the horse skittered sideways and chuffed and scraped a nervous hoof.

“Easy, now . . . ,” the Ranger murmured, tightening on the reins and collecting the animal. “We're not going to get you cooked.” He patted a gloved hand on the barb's withers. “Me neither, I'm hoping,” he added, closing the telescope between his hands. He looked down at the sets of hoofprints he'd been tracking for three days and gave the barb a tap of his bootheels.

But the barb would have none of it. Instead, the animal grumbled and sawed its head and stalled back on its front legs.

The Ranger picked up his Winchester from across his lap. He gave another, firmer tap of his bootheels, this time reaching back with his rifle and lightly striking the barrel on the barb's rump.

“Come on, pard, we know our jobs,” he said.

This time he felt the barb take his command and step forward onto the down-winding path toward the rocky land below them. But even as the animal did so, he gave a chuff of protest.

“I know,” said Sam. “I don't like it either. . . .”

•   •   •

Four hundred yards down, the meandering dirt trail hardened into rock and left the Ranger with no sign to follow other than the occasional broken pine needles where one of the four men's horses had laid down an iron-ringed hoof. But that gave him no cause for concern—the old overgrown game trail lay down the rocky deep-cut hillside. And now that the fire had moved in across the thick woodlands, there would be no other logical way north at the bottom of the hills except to follow the rock chasm to its end.

He knew the bottom trail would stretch fourteen miles before coming to water—twenty-six miles farther before reaching Bagley's Trading Post. By then, the men he followed would need fresh horses. They wouldn't rest these horses out before riding on. That took too much time, he told himself. Men like Royal Tarpis, Silas “Red” Gantry, Dockery Latin never wasted time when they were on the move. Out in the open this way, these men instinctively moved as if someone was on their trail, whether they knew it to be a fact or not.

Men with blood on their trail 
. . . , Sam told himself, knowing there was a younger man leading the gang these days. That man was the Cheyenne Kid, and he was known to be ruthless. But now the Kid was wounded, bleeding. He'd shot and killed two men in Phoebe, a bank teller and the town sheriff. The sheriff had managed to put a bullet in the murdering young outlaw before falling dead in the street. Sam had picked up the men's trail the following day, and he'd been on it ever since.

Sure, they knew someone was coming.

Sam drew the barb to a halt at a break in the trail and looked to his left, across the chasm where the fire roared, smoke filling the sky. He took off his left glove and felt the barb's withers. The horse's coat was dry—hot to his touch. So was his own left cheek, he thought, raising his palm to his face, feeling the prickliness of his beard stubble, noticing the stiff, scorched sensation along his cheek line, the dryness in the corners of his eyes as he squinted them shut for a second, gauging the heat.

Untying the bandanna from around his neck, Sam fashioned a curtain of it beneath the brim of his sombrero and draped it down his left cheek. It would help some, he thought.

“I hope I didn't lie to you, pard,” he said to the horse, recalling his earlier words to the animal.

He picked up his canteen hanging from his saddle horn, uncapped it, swished a mouthful of water around in his mouth and spit it out along the left side of horse's neck. He leaned forward in his saddle and poured a thin stream of water down the horse's muzzle and along its left side, taking in his own leg and back along its flank. The horse shuddered and chuffed and reached its tongue around to lick at its side.

“That's all for now,” Sam said.

He capped the canteen and rehung it. All right, it was hot, but he'd expected that, he reminded himself. Three miles ahead of him, give or take, he saw the fire had waned on its push southward. In the wake of the billowing inferno stood a few bare and blackened pine skeletons.

But he and the horse were safe. He had calculated the risk before putting the horse forward onto the trail. Had the wind made a sudden shift and blown straight at them before they'd reached the trail's halfway point, he would have turned back and raced to the top again before succumbing to the heat. Halfway down the trail, he'd realized there was an end to the fire a few miles to the north—the direction he was headed in. From that point, had the wind changed suddenly, he would have raced down the trail.

Whichever way, they'd make it.

And oddly enough, he thought, owing to the rise of heat, it had been hotter atop the trail than it was here below. Still, it had been risky, said a cautioning voice that often admonished him at times such as these.

Yes, it had,
he admitted.
But 
. . . He let out a breath of relief.

“‘Life is naught without its risks,'” he quoted to himself.

Who had said that? He shrugged as he nudged the horse forward. He didn't know. Probably some obscure penny dreadful author who had stood, or
imagined
himself to have stood, on just such a trail as this.

He started forward along the lower end of the trail, where he knew the heat would be less intense. As he rode he shook his head. Leave it to men like these to ride into a wildfire, he thought.

Why had they done that?

But as he asked the question, he had to remind himself that he had followed without hesitation—so closely that he'd had to water both himself and his horse down to keep up his pursuit. What did that say about him? He didn't want to think about it right now.

He rode on.

Four miles farther down along the chasm trail, he felt the heat on his left begin to wane. A mile farther the temperature had subsided enough that he was able to take the bandanna down from his face. Beneath him the rusty barb rode at a stronger gallop. Along their left, beyond the buffer of boulders, dirt and shale, the woodlands lay blackened and ruined, smoke still rising. It was slower now, less intense, but nevertheless engulfed them in a gray, suffocating haze.

Now he had another problem.

He stopped the horse and stepped down from his saddle. He listened to the barb wheeze and choke, its labored breath rattling deep in its lungs.

“Easy, boy,” he said, rubbing the horse's muzzle. He stepped back to his saddlebags, rummaged out a shirt and shook it out.

He tied the sleeves up around the horse's head and made a veil of the shirt. The horse resisted a little and whipped its head until the Ranger took the canteen and poured water down the horse's face and threw the shirt onto its parched muzzle. He held the wet shirt in place, letting the animal breathe through it. When the horse felt the good of what the Ranger was doing and settled, Sam took his hand off its muzzle.

“Good boy.”

He poured water onto his bandanna and tied it across the bridge of his nose. He led the horse forward by its reins, feeling the thickness of the smoke with every step.

“I make it . . . seven, eight miles to water,” he rasped, as if the winded horse understood his words and took comfort in them.

Three miles farther, he noted the smoke had let up, enough that he could make out the blue of the sky. The horse breathed easier; so did he. Stopping, he took down the warm canteen and lifted the shirt from the horse's muzzle. He kneeled in front of the horse and took off his sombrero like a man given to a vigil of prayer.

“You need this worse than I do,” he said, pouring the water into the upturned hat.

The horse lowered its muzzle into the sombrero and Sam let the wet shirt fall around the ensemble.

When the horse finished the water and tried chewing at the hat brim for more, Sam stood and pulled his wet sombrero away and placed it atop his head. Canteen in hand, he climbed into the saddle and gave the horse a tap of his heels. On their left, among boulder rocks and dry washes, antelope, deer, coyote and an assortment of smaller creatures still skirted in the same direction, slower now that the threat of death inched farther into the distance.